Women’s Overwatch eSports Scholarship
Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri has announced the first all-women’s varsity esports program, where the students can win scholarships! According to ESPN, the program will begin in the fall of this year where the team will compete in the Tespa Collegiate Series, playing Overwatch. It’s awesome to see this kind of support for women in professional gaming!
Stephens College chose to play Overwatch because of “its diverse and strong female characters.” While similar programs have been launched at colleges across the United States, including the University of Utah, this will be the first school to have an all-female esports team for Overwatch! While all-women esports teams do exist, especially with regard to Counter-Strike, gender segregation is not a requirement for teams in esports. Of course because this team is all-female, it stands to reason that their Overwatch team will be all-female as well!
A player for the CLG Red’s all-female Counter-Strike team, Stephanie Harvey, stated that she believes women’s leagues and female-only tournaments to be a “stepping stone” towards more gender equality in high-level competitive gaming, however is not the end goal. Heather Garozzo, who is a backup player for Team Karma, elaborated these sentiments saying, “I don’t want to see a day where all leagues and tournament organizers move towards women’s only events… I long for a day where a woman plays and performs well on a tier one or two team, but that day is a while off due to the scene still being drastically smaller than the pool of male competitors.”
The try outs for the all-women’s Overwatch team for Stephens College begins this summer, where they will recruit twelve players, consisting of a six-person starting team and six alternates. All 12 of the students chosen will receive partial scholarships, and will have access to the same benefits that all other college athletes receive! Dianne Lynch, president at Stephens College, suggested that a way to increase the talent for this team would be to enlist young female competitors through student leagues at all-women colleges. “Our mission is to ensure that women can succeed and can make choices about anything they do in any environment and in any profession. That’s our mission. So why would we not do it in esports? … We have the capacity and the appetite for doing something new that allows us to say, ‘Let’s try this.’ Let’s see if we can provide an environment where women have an opportunity to, in some ways, break barriers.”
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